Just beyond the wall

Walking jacketless on a February morning is a welcome surprise.  I am on a back street in Florida, hoofing my way to a three-day session I’ll be working.  It’s going to be a demanding week in a month of heavy travel.

But I have opted to walk because, literally and figuratively, I don’t want to be so driven.  This walk is the tiny window in my wall of work where I get to notice the world around me.

How fitting it is, then, that for a block, I am following a wall.  It’s hard not to observe the impressive line of curled iron prongs, guarding the top against intruders. This is a barrier serious about its business of keeping people out.

I meditate on this.  Work, lately, has been like a wall for me.  Once I get focused on the task at hand, everything unrelated gets pushed away.  Including Jesus.  It’s not intentional, nor malicious – simply the tyranny of concentration.  But it bothers me.

I picture Jesus, standing just over the wall of my attention, saying:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. (Rev. 3:20)

I want to have that door always open.

A little later, I come across some wonderful tree roots, reaching like fingers into the dark soil.  They start me thinking that maybe my concept of opening a door needs to be adjusted.  The metaphor needs to change. 

What I need is to be so rooted in his love and presence that I don’t need to interrupt my focus to open a door to Jesus in the middle of my day.  Instead, I need his thoughts and priorities to soak up into everything I do.

Maybe the right word is permeate.  On my flight in, I took this rather hazy photo of the shoreline of an estuary.  What caught my eye is how the water seems to visibly seep into the shoreline.

That’s what I want my relationship with Jesus to do: permeate my day.  So that even in the midst of my focused work, his character saturates me.  So that a subterranean communion continues throughout the day, even if it only occasionally bubbles into conscious thought.

Maybe the best way past a wall is under it.

Lord, how we desire to have you permeate our days.  We want our devotional time with you to be just the start of an ongoing day-long dialogue.  Will you, through the Holy Spirit, overcome our unintentional walls?  We invite you in.